Heartrate
by Firefly99
Summary: MGS2. Snake/Otacon. He put the empty mug on top of the computer tower, stared at the little marker reading SLEEP – NORMAL, and thought 'now what? '
1. Chapter 1

Otacon remembered how three years ago, about the time all this had started, one of them had suggested he learned to fight a little. It didn't seem like either of them had suggested it, and it felt more like the idea had somehow sprung up between them and they'd acted on it. Otacon had wanted to, in any case, because it felt like the sort of thing he ought to try to learn when he was working with someone like that. He knew that he'd never get to use it, never become proficient enough for that to be an option, and that even an expert looked like a liability against the dark shape of Snake's shoulders, waist, hips, lurking just that crucial inch beyond easy vision. But he felt he should learn.

At the very least it had been more fun than he'd really wanted to admit. He was predictably bad, and flailed around uselessly attempting to copy what Snake was showing him. Once or twice Snake had lost patience and broken from gentle encouragement into flat-out sarcasm, but all that had done was make him laugh and redouble his concentration.

For some reason the part he'd liked the most was how the morning after his first lesson he woke up and could feel all his muscles hurting each time he moved, hot and strained from his shoulders down to his navel and burning at the backs of his calves. It reminded him of the ache across the muscles below your stomach after coming, or laughing too hard, and didn't disappear as fast as either. He'd told Snake something about it, and he'd smiled approvingly at him as if he'd just noticed something completely new which he liked.

"It always hurts the next morning," he'd said. "Sure you can keep up?"

Otacon had arranged his legs into the way he was meant to arrange them, thinking of how Snake had grabbed and lifted his thighs and ankles into that pose when he failed to pull it off exactly, so he could learn how it felt when you got it right. He'd raised his fists and looked over the top of the knuckles, failing to read Snake's expression.

"Of course not," he said. "Show me that thing I couldn't do yesterday again."

He still remembered the way Snake's mouth had twitched as he'd fallen in beside him, showing the position for him to copy. Otacon had done, some joint in his arm making a cracking sound which he heard in his teeth, and it took that sound for him to realise he was standing the way he should to snap a man's neck and that brought the awkwardness flooding back.

He'd got the hang of it in the end. Snake was a good teacher. He'd hardly used anything except the strength the regular exercise had given him, but his body had felt different, as if he fit it better, and some of his smaller clothes were too tight around his shoulders to wear any more.

--

He did what he could. He waited. He watched the last four episodes of _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ again while taking notes in the vague hope it would make some more sense that way, but it didn't. He was faintly aware it was the otaku equivalent of chain-smoking impatiently while waiting for something to happen – procrastinatory, soothing and bad for you – but found he didn't really care a lot.

He examined his paper when he was done and found it had three lines of text on it. They were '_Shinji is crazy', 'everyone is crazy' _and '_poss. all clever visual/post-modernist metaphor??maybe for religion or poss. being crazy.' _He thought about it for a while before discarding it in a fit of disgust at his own lack of inspiration.

Then he went off to sit by the computer again and watched Snake's heart-rate monitor scribe its way across the screen.

He realised a few minutes later he was tapping his finger and thumb against the mouse to time with the peaks on the readout – _ba-dip ba-dip ba-dip..._

"Snake," he called, over the Codec, because he was lonely. There was a faint hiss of some kind of static, and then Snake's voice came and Otacon broke into an embarrassingly large grin. He was glad Snake wouldn't be able to see it.

"What is it? Anything important?"

"Not really," Otacon admitted. "I just wanted to know what the situation is. I haven't heard from you for too long."

He flicked his mouse up and down some of the more unusual readouts. What kind of military technician would need to monitor the level of gas exchange efficiency in a soldier's lungs in real-time? Snake was slightly under par for that. Cigarettes, probably.

"It's been uneventful," Snake responded. He sounded a little bored, but he was definitely smiling, he could _hear_ it. "It's going to be a long night. I've decided to go to sleep for a while."

"You're safe, right?"

"I'm in a locker."

Otacon found himself pulling up the radar reading and, naturally, he wasn't getting one. Strong harmonic resonance indeed.

"If you're sure," he relented. "What time should I wake you?"

"Four, five hours?"

"Okay," Otacon agreed, cringing inside. He wasn't sure he'd be able to cope with four or five hours staring at the monitor. "I'll...I'll set up this little clock thing I made when I was bored." The thought of that cheered him up for some reason. "I was screwing around with the little pixel-things I made for the image telegraph system you used back on the Tanker and at the time I was trying to microwave something, so I started thinking about timers and thought 'why don't I make a clock?' So I ended up programming this little clock app and I can hook up the alarm system to your Codec so it'll make a noise and wake you up in four and a half hours."

There was a short pause.

"So," Snake said, "you've made a program that looks like you, follows me around like you, and nags me like you."

"Yes," Otacon said, not sure if Snake was being sarcastic, insulting or perfectly genuine.

"You must have a lot more free time."

"Stop it, Snake," Otacon sighed. "You don't want me peering over your biological data all the time like some kind of weird scientific voyeur."

Snake sounded surprised. "You're doing that?"

"Why wouldn't I be?"

"I don't mind so much," Snake decided. "If it's you. It's the idea of government brass spying on me to work out how best to kill me that bothers me."

"Trust me," Otacon said, "that's not about to happen."

He wondered if he had set it up correctly. If he'd set it all up right not even the best government hacker would be able to detect the transmissions, let alone hack into them. But he'd been in such a rush. Maybe he'd done it wrong.

"You say that," Snake said, and his voice was rough with tiredness. "It doesn't make me feel any more likely to get any sleep."

"What's keeping you from just carrying on through the night?"

Snake paused for a while. "I...just can't do that any more."

Otacon pressed his glasses up his nose as far as they would go and held his finger there. They were both getting older and he wasn't stupid enough to think otherwise, but Snake was burning through the years like a time-lapse sequence. Snake had been born before Louise Brown's parents had even considered having her, and even Dolly, with technology that was twenty years younger, died young.

When he took his hand away there was a little ridge on the tip of his middle finger from the nosepiece of the glasses.

"Well, I'll see what I can do," Otacon said instead, and pulled up a lot of nanomachine tables. "I can make you relaxed. Hold on."

"From there?"

"From here," he said, and dragged a slider to the left of the screen. "How's that? Feel any different?"

Otacon watched as the heart-rate readout slowed. He felt his own heart increase in response.

"...What was that?" Snake said, impressed.

"I set the nanomachines to start attaching to the adrenaline in your bloodstream," he explained. "You should be starting to relax. Hang on, I'll try something else."

He clicked. The readout slowed further.

"That one felt good," Snake said, huskily, about half a minute later.

"I just released a lot of dopamine, serotonin, and melatonin into your system. You should be feeling pretty relaxed."

"Yeah," Snake said. "It's like a really good afterglow."

"Er," Otacon responded, pressing his head into his hands, feeling the heat of the blush in his fingertips. "There's not really a lot I can say to that."

"Then don't," came the reply. "I shouldn't have too much trouble with sleep now, at least."

"If you're sure," Otacon said, not wanting to end the conversation. "Don't hesitate to call if anything happens."

The Codec clicked off. Snake hadn't even said goodbye. For some reason that bothered him.

He watched the heartrate monitor neurotically until it slowed yet again, and the little yellow marker saying AWAKE – NORMAL changed to a little pink marker saying SLEEP – NORMAL and he went off to try and get some sleep of his own. He wished he could manipulate his own hormones like that.

He pulled himself into bed and ordered himself to relax, but he could feel the nerves pressing against his chest just underneath his sternum and he had to remember to swallow, and every time he tried to close his eyes they sprung open again nearly automatically. He ended up lying on top of the bed with his legs apart and his arms about twenty degrees from his body in the low self-esteem version of the starfish, staring up at the poster on his ceiling through blurry eyes. He wondered why he'd decided to put Misato Katsuragi up there – she might have been his favourite character in the series, but the idea of her watching him while he slept was a bit disturbing. He made a mental note to take it down later.

Eventually he rolled onto his side and found himself staring uncomfortably at Jonathan Ingram, who stared uncomfortably back. It was no good. He got up and put his glasses back on and perched himself on the edge of the bed with his arms folded high over his shoulders, thinking.

It wasn't normally like this. It wasn't normally this bad! Usually they'd be in contact, all the time. Sometimes he'd be down there with Snake, especially on missions more about spying than brute force. He'd even done the odd sneaking mission along with Snake, keeping hidden, keeping tense, keeping by his side – and that was what made it all doable. Sometimes the missions were even fun – long useless conversations and no real problems – and sometimes they were exciting and he'd learned to thrive on the adrenaline in times like that. Four years ago, he would have flaked under the pressure, and now he'd become aware he loved the feeling of that horrible, terrible risk. After they'd completed a mission he always felt great for days, and then melted into agitated restlessness and boredom afterwards. Snake was rubbing off on him – had to be.

The result was that there was absolutely no way that, if something went wrong, he would be able to do anything. He wished he'd never asked to stay. He wondered why he had. He wondered why it bothered him at all – if Snake hadn't felt entirely able to do everything alone, he wouldn't have let him stay here.

He pulled himself up and went off to take something for his headache, which he swallowed down with a fresh batch of coffee, wincing at the way the pills dissolved a little too fast in the boiling heat and filled his mouth with a bitter, chemical taste which took the rest of the mug to be done away with.

He put the empty mug on top of the computer tower, stared at the little marker reading SLEEP – NORMAL, and thought _now what?_ It wasn't like drowning in stress, but like drowning in grey. It was hammering the F5 key, or rolling over and over in bed until your sheets got all hot with sweat, listening to your clock tick at the back of your eardrums. It was watching your television for hours even though it was displaying a message saying the broadcast was having difficulties. It was elevator muzak.

He rested his head against the monitor so that the tips of his glasses were just touching the screen, and watched the monitor trace just out of focus. It was his heart, Snake's heart, really beating, really alive and really wonderful, and he wasn't sure why he thought it was wonderful only that it was the word that popped into his head. For some reason he started thinking about a buoy on a fixed point along the wave of the readout and it bobbing up and down on the peaks and troughs, and that led to a boat, and that led to the Tanker. How frightened he'd been, how sick he'd felt, being thrown around on an ocean as rough as an EKG trace. How he'd dropped off Olga at the hospital, while guiltily ignoring the fact that Snake was in the back of the car he'd rented, unconscious in the back seat and hooked up to an oxygen mask. How he'd tapped his fingers nervously on the desk as they'd agreed to accept her, consciously knowing Snake would be alright but _feeling _that he needed to be there to watch him or he'd slip away, that if he was no longer observing he'd be both alive and dead like a cat in a box –

Schrödinger. He'd always hated that analogy. Someone who could be even _hypothetically_ that cruel to cats didn't deserve to lauded as coming up with a revolutionary thought experiment. Even if the cat was lucky and survived, there'd still be trauma, horror, scratching – and if the box was flawless, how would you get the cat out before it suffocated? Even the frog in the well had it better than that. At least the frog could jump. Poor little cat. Of course, there was a 'cat state' in quantum computing named after the cat, but that was different, because it wasn't actually about gassing cats, that was about being on or off and the cat thing was just a nickname – and then you could argue that the cat thing was just Schrödinger's extended nickname for quantum mechanics, he realised, but that still meant some sick person, most likely Schrödinger, had to sit down and decide the best way to get his idea across was to talk about performing amoral scientific experiments on cats in boxes. Yeah, he decided, Schrödinger was the bad guy here.

Finally his meta-thoughts caught up with his thoughts and he quietly processed how far he'd manage to deviate from what he'd been thinking about originally, and laughed softly. He wondered if Snake ever had that problem, and that led his thoughts back to Snake, and that annoyed him somewhat because thinking about something else eased the spindly nerves in his stomach.

He began to picture Snake, sleeping in the locker. He imagined the tight fit, the way he'd pulled his arm back to lie against the door. Boxed in, vulnerable and yet not – he would wake up if anyone so much as looked at the locker too hard. He knew how hard Snake's senses had been trained, how easy they could sense triggers other people wouldn't have. It was a weird thought.

He wondered how it would feel to be like that himself.

---

Snake returned, eventually.

It was at about the time the lack of sleep was really working away at Otacon's bones, to the point where the constant supply of coffee couldn't distract from how damn tired he was and how much his body hurt, that he came back. It had been quite frantic, with Otacon tapping against the yellow dot representing Snake's position with his forefinger, excited and relieved and constantly calling him for his progress over the Codec, and then Snake arrived, round the fire escape at the back; the Sneaking Suit might have been ideal for moving silently or being on a mission but in the street he'd be instantly identified as a terrorist or possibly some kind of fetishist if he didn't keep out of the way.

He leapt through the back window, hands firm and tight against the window frame, body effortlessly sleek, still too alive from the adrenaline and the performance drugs to play at being normal, and there was too much force of habit running through his mind for his boots to make even the faintest sound as they landed on the carpet.

Otacon didn't particularly want to welcome him with a big beaming smile like a Fifties housewife because that would be pathetic, but that was what he did.

"Snake," he greeted, because it would feel wrong to call him Dave at this point.

Snake smiled back – a sharp, taut knife-edge – and moved towards the centre of the room a little as if he'd never been there before. As he moved closer, Otacon could pick up that he was still panting slightly, and there was a tension to the way he was standing as if he'd been wired through with electricity.

"Otacon," he said, the last syllable strained with exhaustion. The nanoes were dilating his pupils beyond what would be appropriate for the light level, improving his vision in the knowledge the nanomachine barrier clinging across his retinas would prevent any damage from the extra light – his eyes seemed incredibly dark, and very cruel, and stark against his fair skin and the fair roots of his hair. A genius soldier was also a genius psychologist, Otacon remembered, able to know how to appear as frightening as possible without even thinking about it.

He grinned broadly, because he wasn't fooled even for a second by the act.

"You look absolutely terrible, considering the mission was a perfect success."

"You look absolutely terrible, considering you weren't out there," Snake shot back, giving a genuine smile. The way his eyes narrowed slightly exaggerated the deeply scored lines around them.

Otacon pushed his glasses up his nose.

"I should really switch off the nanoes," he told himself. Snake nodded.

"Yeah. I need a break. Right now I can see," he paused, "a row of little dots for all the people in the apartments above and below us, and all the cars going past. Also a dog running around in circles outside. Also the batteries are low so it keeps strobing. Makes me feel seasick."

Otacon's stomach lurched in memory of the times he'd used the Radar. One time he'd been so horribly distracted by the dots wheeling above him he hadn't been able to move properly, too dizzy with the feeling of controlling himself from far, far above, like a character in a video game.

"Alright, then," he said, pushing the door open. "I'll take care of it. You just relax for a while, or something."

He noticed as he walked down the hall that although it was silent, except for the distant whirring of the computer fan, the silence felt different – close and intimate and peaceful, not lonely. It didn't sound different. It was just a placebo silence – if you believe it's different, it is – but that didn't mean it didn't stop him feeling so ill. He was glad he was so naïve.

He sat by the monitor and clicked and tapped and swore. He tapped in the fifth of the passwords he'd memorised – a long secure mix of letters and numbers; hopefully a hacker wouldn't work out it was just _nigecha dame da_ written in a pretty simple letter-number substitution cipher. Finally he deactivated the nanomachines one by one, watching the readings blip out as the nanoes stopped reporting, leaving only the Codec functional.

Getting up, he wandered into the living room. Snake was sat on the sofa, looking out of place in full battle dress amongst the cheap furniture – it reminded Otacon of those Making Of documentaries for movies where they go into the Green Room and see the orcs drinking coffee.

"Hal," Snake greeted, the word curling out in a plume of smoke.

Otacon frowned, unsure why, and went to sit beside him.

"Could I…have one of those?" he asked. He'd never smoked before, but his fingers ached for the want of holding something long and warm, and he hoped the cigarette would serve as a good distraction; a temporary satisfaction.

"Hypocrisy?" Snake asked, producing the pack. Otacon took it, and pulled one out with some difficulty.

"Peer pressure, mostly," he said, in his most acidic tone. Snake breathed out another lungful of smoke in what looked like an attempt not to laugh. He paused, and leant in very close – Otacon took slightly too long to work out he wanted him to chain his own cigarette off his, still in the side of his mouth. He did so. He thought of the bit that went like that in _Black Lagoon_. He shut his eyes and pulled on the cigarette before he could regret it.

"Well," he started, uncomfortably, "this isn't so – "

He broke off into coughing.

"This your first?" Snake asked, holding onto his upper arm as he hacked away. He should have seen this coming.

"Yuh...yes," he said, when he'd managed to get his breath back. "Thanks to you and your terrible influence."

He turned the cigarette over and over in his fingers like a revolver in slow motion.

"Try and relax more," Snake advised. "Don't try and pull the smoke straight down. Let it rest in your mouth for a while before you inhale it fully. If you do it right you won't cough at all."

He tried again. His throat burned. He was able to resist the urge to cough this time.

"Snake," he said, quietly. "How did the mission go?"

"I already told you," Snake responded, more amused than annoyed. He leant back slightly and the belts and straps on his outfit creaked a little. They didn't do that during missions, did they? That would be a liability. If they did, he thought, he'd have to fix that later. "It was pretty standard. Blew up the Metal Gear, blew up the computers, made off with the documents. Shot a couple of people to prevent it happening again. No hitches, no conspiracies, no teams of superpowered madmen." _Fox only, Final Destination_, Otacon's mind whispered for him automatically – he ignored it. "That was all."

"It went fine, even without me?"

"You _were_ with me," Snake said, and Otacon found himself gnawing on the end of the cigarette a little. "You've been like this ever since the whole ordeal on that Tanker."

"I can't help it," Otacon responded, breathing out smoke with a slight, dry cough. "You weren't talking to me a lot, and I bore easily. That's all."

Snake smiled at him, in a sort of melancholy, heavy eye-lidded way that made Otacon pull in another mouthful of smoke in the hope that he'd think the reddening was because of that.

"You should have had something else on hand to fill up your time with."

"And when I get bored," Otacon continued, waving the cigarette around like a self-righteous laser pointer, "I get nervous. And when I get nervous I can't distract myself. And then I get more bored. And then I get more nervous. It's all a vicious circle."

"What did you do in the end?"

"Oh," Otacon said. "I ended up reading a really bad _Neon Genesis Evangelion_ fanfic."

"Why didn't you read a good one?"

"Because that might have distracted me when you needed me most."

"I see," said Snake, and he ran his forefinger idly down one of the straps over his shoulder and Otacon felt the motion hook his gaze and pin it down as he let his hand relax against his lap. "How bad?"

"Shinji was pregnant," Otacon said.

"Oh."

"Kaworu's. Only he was married to Asuka. Who was cutting herself to deal with her anorexia. And Misato had been forced to take up a second career as a pole dancer to support her unborn child."

"Who came up with that?"

Otacon shrugged. "Don't know. It's the internet, after all. It was one of those really long epic-length fanfics, the kind that was popular in the mid-to-late Nineties. Ever since 2000 or so, they've been slowly dying out. The fashion seems to be that fics are getting shorter and shorter. First one-shots, then drabbles, then one-sentences, and there was a big thing about six-word fics for some reason a year or so back. Fashion bounces, though. I suppose it's going to end up heading in the other direction and we'll all be reading ninety-chapter sagas again by about twenty-ten."

"Is that a good thing?"

"It might be," Otacon said. "I mean, there are some authors who write nothing but one-shots and claim to have problems with finishing stuff. I've always thought they were just lazy, really. Or just willing to go off and chase a new idea and give up on the old one far too quickly. I suppose it's a good way of broadening your horizons, but if you're just writing hundreds of one-shots of the same pairing, with the same plot, and with the same feel, you should really just shut up and write something long and get it over with, don't you think? Ultimately, though, if you start out with an idea that sucks, your fanfic is going to suck, which was probably why the fic I was reading sucked so badly."

"I've got no idea," Snake said. "You're the one who knows."

"Yeah," Otacon said, pathetically. "I suppose so."

They sat in not-quite silence for a while. Otacon concentrated on the end of the cigarette – the urge to cough insanely had mostly gone, but it wasn't stopping the smoke getting in his eyes. He noticed the way Snake was breathing the smoke out – calm and confident, like in old movies where they'd show a close-up of the person exhaling and slow down the footage so it looked like they were breathing out water. He thought of Snake breathing out water. He thought of the cold seeping into his bones, the rain, the punishing, freezing river, and Snake's body spiralling down amongst the bubbles. He thought of the way his coat had billowed out around him as he'd dived down and the way he'd wished he'd left it on the boat and how his mind had screamed about seeing another member of his _family_ lost to the water and how he could not would not _will not let that happen_ – how he'd pulled him onto the boat and pulled a muscle and hadn't even noticed the pain until a day later. He remembered the first time their lips had met. He'd felt from all the doujin it would be embarrassingly like a kiss and leave him blushing, but each lungful of air he pushed into Snake just made him dizzier and dizzier with fear and his conscious knowledge was proven right when it felt absolutely nothing like a kiss at all. He'd tasted of salt and smoke. He had felt cold and waxy and rough against his mouth and utterly yielding and empty. Like a corpse.

"How're you getting on with that?" Snake asked, and Otacon started around for a moment before he realised Snake was talking about the cigarette.

"It's..." he started, "sort of...nice, now I've got the hang of it. Don't think it's going to become a habit, though."

"I was kind of hoping," Snake started, leaning back a little, "I could buy you a bunch of different brands and we could try them all out and you could decide on your favourite."

Otacon smirked. "I'd probably like that. If not for the whole lung-cancer-antisocial-bad-for-you-horrible-ways-of-dying-thing."

Snake let out a snort of laughter, and his impossibly cruel eyes crinkled and softened around the corners. "Yeah. Better you don't start."

"I don't know. Maybe I'll keep a packet by the computer while I'm dredging up information. Just in case."

"Of what?"

"Don't know," he said, weakly. "Hidden laser traps."

Snake smiled at him through the slight haze of nicotine in Otacon's head, and he felt something tighten behind his collarbone.

"I should get out of this Sneaking Suit," he suggested, standing up, stretching, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray on the table. Otacon nodded slightly. All he could really think about was that he'd finally get some real actual sleep.

--

The Sneaking Suit felt impossibly smooth under the palms of his hands.

Otacon found his hands running down Snake's spine, over the criss-cross of laces over the small of his back, and breathed out very slowly. His lungs still felt sore and hot from the cigarette; his voice still sounded hoarse. Never again, he told himself. Except maybe under extremely specific circumstances.

"How do I…" he asked, uselessly, not waiting for an answer before he tugged at the knot securing the laces, and started to unwind them from the eyes they were threaded into.

Snake sighed. "You're not supposed to undo that part."

"What?" Otacon groaned, trying to rethread it. "But I thought if I undid that part – "

" – No, you undo it at the front," Snake said, grabbing Otacon's hands and bringing them around to the strap over his chest, "and then you take off the harness, like a backpack."

Otacon said, "You do?"

Snake sighed and fidgeted and started to mess about with the clasps on his legs. Otacon was fine with that. He wasn't sure he could trust himself taking those off. He'd have to hook his finger under the strap and run it round underneath, the bones in his fingers running along the line between his legs and his – yeah, he thought, better not think too hard about that.

"Why," Snake asked, slyly, "are you trying to help me out anyway?"

Otacon gnawed on a small bump on the inside of his mouth with his canines.

"Guilt, mainly," he said, "because I feel I haven't done enough, and – and I wasn't able to anyway." He stopped. "You know, when I started talking, I was hoping I'd come out with some convincing excuse which was less pathetic than the truth. Somehow. Magically. Somewhere in between my brain and mouth."

Snake sighed and did his best to step out of the harness around his legs.

"Hal," he said, simply. Otacon realised he should be listening, but he was finding Snake's spine rather distracting – a deep, supple line under the tight fabric. He shoved his thumb into his glasses as hard as he could, wondering if it was some kind of subconscious reaction to prevent an anime nosebleed which he knew couldn't happen in the real world but had seen more than enough times. "I'm not going to try to talk you out of something you know you're feeling irrationally. I can't. No-one can. But it doesn't change the fact that you're not thinking right. Ever since the Tanker..."

Otacon stepped towards him and pushed the shoulder straps over, taking it off frontward.

"It's not just the Tanker," Otacon admitted, and instantly regretted it. He bit his tongue, waiting for Snake to ask more, but he didn't – he just reached backwards over his shoulder and touched Otacon on his.

"I knew that much," Snake explained. "The Tanker wasn't the first time you'd saved my life and I don't think it'll be the last, either. It wasn't the first time we failed a mission and it sure as hell wasn't the first time we've done something immoral. So why?"

Otacon fell silent.

"Can you tell me?"

"I…" Otacon started, feeling like his body was a hollow vessel and was being filled inch by inch by ice-cold water. He fell silent again. The muscles in his throat weren't moving when he told them to.

"You're not going to say anything, are you?" Snake said, and sighed, turning towards Otacon. "I don't mind. I've got my own idea, anyway."

"Your own idea?"

"You're supposed to be helping me, right?" Snake said. "Help me get this thing off." He tugged at the undershirt.

"Nice subject change," Otacon observed. "Not very surreptitious, though. Work on it. Besides, why do you need me to help you take off a skintight shirt and a pair of pants, however hi-tech?" He folded his arms. "Actually, why do you need me to help you take your gear off at all? You normally handle it fine by yourself."

Snake looked at him, his expression impenetrable. Otacon noticed the noise of the computer fan whirring in the background again. Why was it so loud? Probably because it was the size of a dinner plate and there was actually three of them. He needed to set up a better heat sink. He'd made one out of refrigerator parts once, as a kid. It had worked surprisingly well.

"Maybe not ideas so much as…hopes," Snake finally said, even more cryptically. Otacon groaned.

"I think, basically, the thing is that neither of us really want to talk about…whatever this thing is," he pointed out. "And it might not even be the same thing. I – I mean, it'll have to be a pretty huge issue since neither of us want to say anything. And how long have we known each other now? Think of all the things we've gone through together."

"Yeah," said Snake, "it'd have to be."

"Something big and dangerous."

"Probably concerning the two of us."

"In such a way that it might damage us irreparably," Otacon lamented. "Something we'd have to bottle down to prevent anything coming between us, or ruining Philanthropy."

"Yeah," Snake agreed. "I'd say it could be one of two things."

"Two things?"

"Either that we each hate the other," Snake started, "or that we don't."

Otacon nodded. "We've got a job to do. We can't think about any of that." He smiled, weakly. "But I sure as hell don't hate you. So it can't be that."

Snake's brow softened for a second, and Otacon saw his eyes flash with some kind of emotion – longing, or sorrow, he couldn't tell. Had he always been this bad at interpreting people or was Snake just that opaque?

"I'm always here to protect you," Otacon said, instead. "I have to be. That's why the mission bothered me. It felt like I wasn't there."

Snake swallowed, and then wrenched the undershirt off over his head as if he was trying to stop himself from saying something.

"Never thought I'd feel you were the one who needed to be protected," Otacon continued, affectionately. The nosepiece of his glasses felt warmer than usual when he finally took his middle finger away. "Those years ago, I'd convinced myself I was helpless. Now I know I'm really..." he felt himself losing his thread, "really...kind of...not."

"You don't need me to tell you I'll protect you in return," Snake said, rather softly, bending down to unclasp the boots, unconsciously showing Otacon a nasty bruise on his right shoulder. "I will. I always will." His fingers hooked under the lacing; he pulled it away, like an action movie hero ripping out the wires in an elaborate bomb. "These days I want to protect you more than ever. Differently. And I know I could, if things weren't like this."

"You know you could?"

Snake looked him straight in the eyes, a wicked smile burning at the corners of his mouth. "Come on. I've seen the pile of CloudxZack doujinishi next to all that CloudxTifa stuff."

"At least I wasn't taking photographs of – of posters on a mission," Otacon fired back, trying not to laugh. "I mean, all those cute little Japanese girls were one thing, but 'EyeWire'? I've no idea what an EyeWire even is! Sounds...painful, if you ask me. Like some sort of cyborg thing." He blinked. "How the hell do you know what a doujinishi is, anyway? No, forget that – why the hell were you looking?!"

Snake shrugged. "I looked it up. And I was curious."

"Curious?"

"The Vaseline smears on the covers made me think they were probably interesting."

"_Snake!_"

"Well, you asked."

"That's..." Otacon protested, flushing violently, "...you can't – I – I like the stories."

"It's not really my business what you like," Snake reminded him, and Otacon felt something cold and weighty in his abdomen. "It can't be. We've got other things to pay attention to."

"Yeah," Otacon said, and breathed out heavily. "It's just tempting fate. There's so many ways..."

"...Like this, there's less to go wrong."

"Less distractions."

"More professionalism."

"Yeah," Otacon said, faintly, strangely aware of the position of every single one of his loosely-held fingers. "This is how things should really be."

Snake's gaze darted up Otacon's body, and he saw the weight of the age in his eyes, like gravity. He swallowed.

"I should be getting to bed, now," Otacon excused himself, starting to leave.

"Goodnight," Snake's voice came. "Oh, and if you can't find that one with Gillian Seed, that's because I'm borrowing it."

"Snake, just..." Otacon sighed, too tired to argue, "just give it back when you can, alright?" He remembered something. "Anyway, how did you get that bruise on your shoulder?"

Snake glanced down for a second. "I banged it on the locker door when I was waking up."

Otacon gave a brief snort of laughter, and headed to bed.


	2. Chapter 2

He ended up going through his doujin to identify which one Snake had taken, and ended up finding a nice one he hadn't known he'd had and found himself reading it instead of going straight to sleep, lurching and shuddering his way through the pages. He probably should have thought of Snake, but he didn't think of Snake at all, only the characters and their shapes and their relationship and the translation he'd pencilled in the margins to prevent him having to dive for a dictionary every time. _This is safe_, he reminded himself. _I've got this, there's no reason for me to seek anything else – I need release, I'm only human, and this'll do for now, because everything else is too risky. _His hand loosed for a moment, and he allowed himself to catch his breath – _I can't risk what I have with real people over stupid urges like this. I can't risk what I owe to the world –_

His mind was wondering again. It was killing the mood. He sought around to regain focus. His hand hurt. He flexed his wrist before resuming. Page 19 and 20 were more distracting. His panting, the crosshatching on his cheeks, her mouth, the way her arm was curved behind her – he fixed his mind hard on the doujin, playing scenarios though in his head, picturing how they must both feel at once, trying to hear their voices – original, dub, both, his own, didn't matter – stammering out the dialogue – _motto, motto... motto fukaku! ikuu__ – _he mouthed it in the back of his throat without making a sound. He worked harder and concentrated and finally arrived, trembling, gasping, and as he balled up the tissues and discarded them and slid under the slightly sweat-damp sheets he consciously thought that it ought to make him feel at least a little better. Maybe he'd be able to face Snake more easily tomorrow. If it worked he'd probably need to buy a lot more doujin. Did they have the budget for that? Probably he'd have to send out another few million emails in capital letters from DR. BAKARE TUNDE, an expatriate from Nigeria, who'd inherited $49000000 (FORTY-NINE MILLION US DOLLARS) from his father, the late General Escobar, and NEEDED THE RECIEPIENT'S AID AS A TRUSTED CONFIDANT. He hated sending those.

As he lay back, the combination of the exhaustion and the soothing, tingling afterglow made his thoughts slow a lot faster than otherwise, which was his intention. Less time in which to think about Snake, he rationalised, drudgingly, and at the same time became aware he'd been thinking two thoughts at once and the rest of his mind was fixed on Misato's dark eyes staring at him from the ceiling and wondering about how if things were different she and Kaji might have been somewhat happy, and he was amused that he could think more than one thought at once, and he wondered if that only happened when he was starting to sleep, or if he'd dreamt the whole thing. He attempted experimentally to monitor his thought processes as he succumbed, only to wake up in the morning unable to remember the moment he'd fallen asleep and with threads of what he was sure had been a pretty good dream strewn across his mind. He remembered nothing more than a faint flash of colour and a vague feeling that Snake had been in it, but nothing more than that.

If this was an anime, he thought, he'd be able to remember the dream. And it would be a prophetic dream, full of weird metaphor, or vague out-of-context flashes. Or an extended flashback, or something like that. Probably, he decided, it was better this way.

He got up and dressed and looked at the clock and groaned that it was already early in the afternoon. It'd be good, he decided – the shorter the day was, the better. He wanted to go back to two years ago, when they'd just started Philanthropy, when it was all still a novelty, when Snake was still a friend to him. Back when one EKG trace had looked a lot like another. Back before he'd considered taking up smoking just to know what the taste of smoke on his lips would be like, and if they'd be any closer if their mouths were flavoured the same. Back before he'd spent that night soaked through with salt water and rain and tears and holding an unconscious, heavy, dying man in his arms, close to his body heat, tight and firm and utterly loving and begging him to wake up, please –

That'd been what had made him realise, really. Thinking about what he was sure at the time that he'd lost. At the time, when he'd pulled him out of the water, he'd been pulling out his father, pulling out E.E., but when he'd got him on the boat he'd realised so completely that_ no, this is Snake and he's dying and I'm the only one who knows and the only one who can save him_. It had been Snake's lungs he'd breathed into. It had been Snake's lips he'd sealed his own against. It had been Snake's ribs he'd broken in the name of CPR, whispering _sorry_ under his breath as he did so. That was when he'd figured it out. At the time he'd wept like a child – cried for Snake, choking and painfully; cried for himself for only being able to know what he had when it was nearly all gone; cried for how naïve he was that he hadn't expected any of this; either his own feelings, or this damn situation. Snake was a soldier. He was a killer. If there was one profession which attracted karma, it was his. He'd either die in battle, he realised, or die of old age at the age of forty-five.

But it was _love_, and wasn't that always worth a chance?

He knew Snake, utterly well. He'd seen him in good times, bad times, and times so bleak he'd thought they'd never be able to live through them until they both did. He'd stopped seeing him as an immortal, amazing god-soldier very quickly, which was good, because self-delusion tends to lead to disaster and he had a whole steel and gunsmoke and blazing fission legacy to prove it. These days when he thought of Snake, he thought of his intelligence first; the genius soldier who'd found and taken impossible third options and proven everyone wrong, learned things more quickly than anyone he'd ever met, taught him to speak languages he'd never needed to know before in his sheltered little world. Then he thought of that wonderful noble streak he'd be the first to deny and the first to display. He fought for what he believed in – what higher calling could you get than that? And then he thought of that weird compassion, born out of a mixture of loneliness, probably, and contrast to the fact that he was capable so much cruelty. He wasn't open. But he was worth it, for that intelligence, that humour, that love, that _meaning_.

Love wasn't a bad thing, was it?

Even when he got it wrong. Even though there was no good that could come out of this. They were fighting a war together. If they tried anything, and then anything came between them, would they still be able to look each other in the eye?

He turned on the coffee machine, because his head hurt. Maybe he needed to start watching less _Neon Genesis Evangelion_, he thought, and start watching more _Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann_.

----

He spent the day trying to avoid looking at Snake, or talking to Snake, or thinking about Snake. It had been bad enough when it was just him on his own. Now that he knew how Snake thought, it was even worse.

He sat down in front of the computer and started writing a program to improve the security on the Codec – no more fake difficulty, like on that Tanker. He named his first four variables SIMON, YOKO, KAMINA and VIRAL. Snake came in and gave him a mug of coffee, which he accepted gratefully, and he ended up having a long conversation with him about the human drive for technology before he remembered he was supposed to be avoiding thinking about him, by which time Snake had left the room and there was a distinct, dizzy twist in his stomach – exactly what he was trying to avoid. He sighed and found he didn't have a great deal of recollection of what he'd actually said, only that he had been trying to make the argument that the fact that humans had invented the lolcat was proof of their inherent goodness.

It was useless, he realised instantly. He couldn't avoid thinking about Snake because he just liked him too much. This wasn't just an urge, and he was forgetting that. It was Snake, honestly, intellectually, that he was after. He needed time with him to feel normal – wasn't that why he'd gone spare on that mission? His hands ached to hold him, to hold him so close he could hear his heartbeat drumming through into him and tap the rhythm out with a single finger in perfect time with it. How the hell could he act like he was being professional when he felt like this?

He didn't have a chance. This was hopeless.

He named a constant THEIMPOSSIBLE just so he could set KAMINA to be always greater than it. It wasn't even a particularly funny otaku joke but he felt like he needed to make them right now.

Drawing back a little, he noticed that when Snake had come in with the mug, he'd propped up a still-wrapped carton of cigarettes against the computer tower. He laughed at that. Peer pressure at its finest. He stacked it on top of a pile of CDs full of freshly-burned, not-entirely-legal PSX ISOs for safe keeping.

After an hour he gave up with the code, and ended up loading up the nanomachine control panel. The truth was that, although he knew his way around the most common functions, he hadn't been able to figure out the rest. He could poke around the onscreen manual when it was deactivated, at any rate. Maybe he'd learn something.

Instead of just probing around, though, he found himself activating the reporter nanoes – the monitors that sent back biological data. The marker turned from a little grey one saying OFF to a little yellow one saying AWAKE – NORMAL. The heart-rate monitor started again, waves on a boiling sea. Anarchically, not entirely morally, he realised he had Snake's well-being in the palm of his hand. He had complete control over the strongest and most gifted mercenary of the century… every little thing he felt, everything he did. If he wanted to he could flood him with hormones to make him feel euphoric, or bleak, or lonely, or desperate for sex. He realised Snake had realised that before he did.

He never trusted the others with nanomachine control any more. Just him.

Judging by what he'd said earlier, that probably meant something.

He wondered where Snake was, and what he was doing. _Would he mind,_ he thought, _if _– he tapped a button and activated the medical controller nanoes, the actual workhorses of the system – _all I need to do is click here, and I could..._

He played his mouse over the diagram of Snake's system, hunted for the names of nerves and systems, panned through the list of intrinsic functions of the nanoes. It would be so easy, he thought. He could draw them to every area of his body capable of feeling pleasure. He'd set off the cillia. Put the controller in his... He bit his lip. He could flood his brain with every joyous hormone there was – he'd be utterly lost in it, unable to think of anything else. And it would just be so simple. This was all part of his job, wasn't it? Keeping him safe, sane, happy? He wouldn't even have to touch him to make him strain and warm and arch and tremble and moan –

His cursor crossed over the 'Send nanoes to specific targets...' function on the menu and hovered there for a second before he shook the thought out of his mind and clicked away, hastily. He couldn't do that to Snake. Not without him knowing. That'd be almost like...

And he didn't want it, anyway, he realised. He didn't want it. All this time, all those missions, all those disasters when the distance yawned between them like he was trying to grab Snake's hand and kept missing. He wanted to be close.

There was absolutely no way he could keep this up, he decided, looking around. It was dark outside. The small indicator lights on the computer seemed a little brighter in the muggy gloom. He hadn't even noticed the change in the light.

It was risky. He knew about his curse, alright. He knew that his own way of dealing with relationships was awful, and that Snake was no better, and if something terrible happened; if one of them got hurt, if one of them died, if one of them decided not to continue on – it would be terrible. They'd be stuck unable to look each other in the eye, even in the platonic way they'd been able to two years ago. But for something like this, he decided, it would be a worthy risk.

He switched off the monitor screen, and caught a glimpse of his own reflection – unkempt, unshaven, resolute. He took his glasses off, and the soft blur in his vision removed the creases of tiredness and age in his face. _Can't have that_, he thought, and put them back on again, his own image resolving into sharpness again, his eyes framed in their intensity, and he thought it looked quite fetching for a second before he laughed at himself for being so vain. He couldn't remember really, seriously looking at himself like this since those times he'd tried cosplaying, and that had been different, because it was like he wasn't actually looking at his own face.

"Otacon?" came a call from behind him, and he jumped and cringed. Of all the times Snake could have caught him –

He turned, and Snake was, definitely, stood there. He wasn't glowing in the light or sparkling like something out of a shoujo anime, but the way he'd said his name certainly made him think of one. _Miaka. Tamahome._ Actually, thinking about sounding like Tamahome, didn't Sn – No, he decided, trying to drag his thoughts up. He wasn't going to let his mind wonder now.

"Er," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"My name's on the lease for this place too," Snake said, calmly, folding his arms. Something about the way he'd stretched the final syllable, the way he growled it out softly, grazed against some part at the back of Otacon's mind, right up where he processed thought. He clasped his hands a little.

"Besides," he continued, "there was that anime you like on one of the channels – the one about the space bounty hunters. I think it's that episode where they eat the weird mushrooms. I thought you'd like to watch it with me."

_Yes,_ screamed Otacon's brain.

"I've, er, seen it a lot," he said, and he was suddenly plunged straight back to Shadow Moses, the cold and snow and the fear and awkwardness. "About...five times, actually."

"Something's on your mind."

He didn't sound surprised.

"Yeah," Otacon said, gratefully throwing off the need to be nervous. "That's pretty much it. I'm sure you can guess what about, you're not an idiot."

"You've been brooding all day about it, haven't you?"

Otacon's eyes slid over to the computer. "Well, for most of the day. It's been driving me crazy. I feel like I'm in a really whiny fanfiction."

Snake's mouth twitched into a faint smile and Otacon grinned back, walking over to him quickly, and taking hold of his arms in a fit of emotion_. Might as well do things properly, right?_ he thought. _Beyond the impossible!_

"Basically," he said, "I've been thinking about what happened yesterday, for far longer than I really had to, probably. What we said. About keeping professional, and things like that."

Snake nodded, and his eyes filled with the same longing-or-sorrow emotion he'd noticed before.

"And, you know what?" he said. "I think we're being stupid."

"Yeah," Snake agreed, quietly. "But I'd like to hear your reasons why."

Otacon swallowed, and began.

"Because," he said, "first of all, we're going to drive ourselves crazy telling us we shouldn't love each other, when we do. Second of all, is there really that big a difference between loving someone platonically and otherwise? Well, of – of course there is, or there wouldn't be any laws against incest, but you know what I'm getting at, and I'm getting off topic." He tried to shove his glasses up his nose before realising they were all the way up there anyway. There was a subject he really didn't want to think about. He hoped the hesitation hadn't made him look any less sincere. "Romance isn't better or truer, or more intense or more real, than having a best friend or a close family member, it's just...different. Right? So we're not saving ourselves any huge emotional trauma or anything by refusing to admit to each other that we're in love. Which brings me onto my third point. Feelings happen. They're there whether you make them official or not. If they didn't work like that, we wouldn't have such a thing as unrequited love. So, by refusing to act on anything, by refusing to mutually accept how we feel, we're not changing how we'll feel if something does happen." He nodded. "Logically, the only way to avoid hurting when people close to you get hurt is not to have anyone close to you. But we know that's stupid. After all," he said, his voice slowing, hushing, "how – for how long have we been lonely?"

Snake's body tensed a little – his eyes closed slightly. Otacon smiled.

"All those lonely years. Just for want of...people, companionship. We've messed up so many times with them, haven't we? But now we don't need to worry about that. We're together. We shouldn't have to be lonely any more. And I – " his voice started to shake a little, with adrenaline rather than tears, " – I love you, and I can't just refuse to be with the people I love just because – just because I'm an idiot, just because I'm too afraid to get close to people, just because I'm feeling things about people with an attitude of – of complete _autofail_. And I know you feel the same. I love you," he said, again, in case Snake hadn't picked it up. "David."

Otacon heard the intake of breath at the sound of the old, unfamiliar name, and watched his expression soften just a little, the furrows in his brow smoothing.

"Say...say that for me, one more time," he said, his voice brief and husky as if just making a sound felt like glass dust in his mouth.

"What?" Otacon frowned. "The whole thing, from the top? I can't really remember how I started."

Snake grinned at that, and Otacon flushed and thought _no, no, it's David now._ He didn't wait for him to tell him off.

"David," he said. "Dave. You'd think it was a magic word, the way it makes your face go. How many people know your name, David? Only about four or five people. It's kind of sad, I think. No wonder you're so lonely. But it's something special, as well, that only you and a few other people have, and that no-one can take."

He breathed in, slowly.

"Do you..." he asked, eventually, "do you even still answer to it?"

Dave smiled at him the way the feeling of the nicotine in his head had smiled at him that smoky evening.

"Yeah," he said. "I do."

It was the oddest way of saying _I love you_ that Hal had heard of, besides a bullet to the throat, but it worked and he knew it worked and all he could do was take his glasses off and put them back on again just to give his fingers and eyes time to recover, and as he slipped them back on the back of his knuckles grazed against Dave's extended hands. He stood rigidly, and Dave did too, and it was like something had dropped into his chest. They seemed so far apart – they felt so far apart –

For a fraction of a second he was able to process that incredible want, and then he sickened of it and threw his arms around Dave as if he was slipping away into the water again, and this time – this time – Dave held back, just as strongly. His scent – natural, musky, comfortable – spilled into his head; he'd only noticed it subconsciously before.

His mouth brushed along, rough against something too long to be stubble and too short to be a beard, and Dave hesitated a tender fraction of a second before he brought himself around into a kiss. He tasted of salt and smoke, but this time he felt warm, and all of a sudden Hal was grinning too broadly to properly kiss back and Dave had noticed and was laughing.

"You're different to a woman," Hal said, inanely, and instantly wished he hadn't.

"Glad you've noticed," Dave responded. His fingers stopped somewhere at the back of Hal's neck – he remembered that if Dave had felt like it he was strong enough to snap his neck effortlessly, and the chill he felt enhanced the sound of his heart slamming in his throat. "How long has it been?"

"Twelve years, I think," Hal said, consciously knowing he shouldn't feel so embarrassed. "I told you I'd been lonely."

"You were twenty-three."

"I think so. About that age. It wasn't my first time, not by a long shot, there was this one girl in the anime club, and she – we weren't serious, but – "

"I hadn't even had my first time by then," Dave said, grinning. "I didn't so much as kiss a person until I was twenty-five. I was so lonely."

"We don't have to think about that any more," Hal decided. Thinking about any of that made the guilt creep into his bones like liquid helium. Besides, what did any of it matter now?

He kissed him again, desperately, comfort burning inside him, his hand at the back of Dave's head, fingers buried in the thick roots, occasionally sliding down the softer, dyed hair, and he could feel Dave's pleasure to finally have someone, to finally be able to love someone like this, in every single motion he made.

Eventually Dave said something, but he hadn't bothered pulling away from the kiss first, and Hal only heard deep, meaningless tones in his jaw and couldn't make it out. He let go.

"What was that?"

"Are we going to go somewhere else?" Dave asked, slyly. "See how far this goes."

Hal nodded, smiling, picking up his palm top from a desk as he went. He'd left the medical nanoes on.

----

Dave's body was covered in scars – etched in them, like tallies on a prison wall. He knew that. He'd seen Dave naked before, in some very different contexts. But for some reason, now, it just exaggerated the mystery of him – how even though they were so close, there was a lot he still didn't know about. Nothing important, but it was there. It didn't upset him. It intrigued him. There were bullet-puckers in his flesh in places where he was sure they wouldn't have an opportunity to heal up –

"How did you get this one?" he asked, very softly, running his hand down a hard knife-cut across his stomach. Dave glanced down.

"The Tanker," he said. "Got seen, got into a close-quarters fight for my trouble."

"And what about this one?" He brushed his thumb over a very faint-looking bullet-scar, raised slightly, a little paler than the rest of the skin on his forearm.

Dave's hand tightened a little around Hal, and he gasped a little in pleasure as he felt the calluses slide along his length.

"Zanzibar," he said, breathing out a little raggedly as Hal lowered his mouth to kiss him again, across the sides of his lips, so as not to prevent him talking. "Got cornered in an elevator by a band of famous mercenaries called the Four Horsemen. I was lucky to get out alive."

Hal's fingers found a firm ridge of a scar in the small of Dave's back, and he stroked it wonderingly before bringing his lips down to brush along the one on his stomach. Dave gazed back from the pillow with eyes so dark Hal wasn't even able to tell if they were green or blue, and his skin was flushed and smooth with sweat.

Hal tried to find words, but Dave was rubbing up against him and running his hands up and down him and for a moment his tongue curled up in his mouth with pleasure and he lost the first syllable into a gasp, pressing himself against Dave, shuddering up against the muscles. "I – it's not luck."

"Not luck?" Dave responded, and his stubble grazed Hal's cheek – he wished he'd shaved that day so he'd be able to feel it better.

"I'd tell you you're incredible," Hal continued, heavy breathing making his words into husky moans, "but I don't think you want to hear it."

Dave drew his knees up around Hal's sides, and his hand strained rough and sticky against him with a sudden, rushing intensity, and all Hal could do was groan thinly.

"Don't mind hearing it from you," he said, and his other hand laced up into the back of Hal's hair, pulling him close with his forearm – Hal's hand shuddered, slicked with all the Vaseline, across Dave's stomach and chest, over his shoulder, behind his neck, and he was left holding him, very close.

He caressed Dave's cheekbone with the tips of his fingers, arm coiled around the back of his head.

"Cowboy Bebop isn't really on, is it?" he asked.

Dave shook his head slightly. "No."

Hal laughed, and for some reason he kept laughing, and Dave affectionately said something about him ruining the mood, so he got himself back under control just as Dave's hand finally set him off twitching and shaking, and then all he needed to do was attempt to kiss him and miss, catching the tip of his nose, for his body to finally give in, and he tensed up around Dave half unable to let go. Dreamily, he slackened, and Dave remained, shuddering and newly sticky, under him.

"I guess you don't feel up to a lot now," he said, and he was still panting. His browline had softened in exertion – he looked almost vulnerable like this. It was amazing, considering his background, that he'd agreed to let himself become this vulnerable. His mind ran over everything – the exposed neck; the trusting position, flat on his back; the naked body. Everything you shouldn't do on a battlefield, and when he'd first met him he'd been sure that he'd never taught himself to be aware of whether he was on or off it.

But he was human. He couldn't be guarded at all times.

Hal scrabbled for the palm top, pulled out the stylus, and arced it across the screen. Dave jolted in pleasure, face flushing further.

"What was that?" he gasped, struggling for breath.

Hal moved back onto the bed, easing his arms around Dave's waist, lying back atop him again.

"The nanoes," he explained, trying not to be distracted by the wonderful glow in his head, showing him the screen. "See?"

Dave was silent for a while except for his heavy breathing, then smirked. "I get it."

Hal kissed Dave, calmly, lingeringly, before tapping the stylus again. The cilia were working so hard, and he drove them to every part of Dave's body, highlighting the areas, setting the millions of tiny machines to flood his mind with hormones and drugs linked to euphoria and increased sensation, and he stabbed and pounded away at the screen and Dave warmed and thrashed and finally breathed shudderingly into release. Hal's mind momentarily blazed with pride and awe and no small amount of love and he glowed against Dave as they relaxed in tandem.

The old guilt started to sink into his stomach, and he tensed a little, but he realised Dave's hand was interlacing with his own and he squeezed back.

"We, er," he started, "probably shouldn't have done that."

"We probably shouldn't have," Dave echoed, with just enough disdain injected into the word _probably_ to assure him he was being sarcastic or ironic – Hal had always been a bit fuzzy on the boundary between those two.

"So, bad idea?" Hal asked.

"Probably." His voice was gravel, pushed against Hal's throat.

"What now?"

"What do you mean, 'what now?'"

"It's like the person who's writing this fanfic is trying to wind down," Hal sighed.

"Was that a metaphor?"

"Never mind."

Hal's mind slowed in the quiet.

"Snake," he said, and Snake shuffled a little before he responded.

"Yeah?"

"What do we do next?"

"Do what we always do," he responded, "of course."

"So how do you propose we do that?"

"There's that contact," Snake said, calmly, "that one woman, the Muscovite. Didn't she say she'd come up with some information?"

Otacon smiled at the idea of work. "Oh, her. Suppose I'd better fly out to speak to her in person. You know what she's like."

"Otacon," Snake replied, and he was doing his absolute best to sound level and cold and comfortable and it would have been convincing had he not been holding Otacon just a little harder, "you're not thinking of doing it alone, are you?"

"Well – " Otacon started, and he realised where this was going. Snake nodded his head a little.

"You know what it's like," he said. "I'll go crazy waiting for you to get back."


End file.
